1. Field of the Invention
This application relates generally to sports equipment that enhances an athlete's grip on an object and, more specifically, to a hand-worn article that supports an anti-slip surface adjacent to at least one location of an athlete's hand to enhance an ability of the athlete to grip or otherwise control a ball or other equipment during an athletic event.
2. Description of Related Art
Athlete's such as baseball and softball players, for example, frequently grasp and throw a ball during the course of a game. The ball often rolls through grass before reaching the athletes, collecting moisture along the way. Rain is also common during the early portion of baseball and softball season, and collects on the ball and throwing hand of the athletes, thereby adding to the difficulty of gripping and throwing the ball, even if the ball has not made contact with the ground before reaching the athletes. Regardless of how moisture is collected at the interface between the ball and the athletes' hands, this moisture makes it difficult to grip and throw the ball accurately.
Athletes in other sports also commonly encounter situations where they lack the desired grip on a ball or other piece of equipment. For instance, basketball players sweat, often profusely, during a basketball game played within an indoor arena. Sweaty palms make it difficult to reliably dribble, pass, catch and shoot the basketball, and can significantly impede the ability of the players to play to realize their full potential.
Another situation where insufficient grip is encountered is when young children begin to enjoy a sport where they are required to grip a ball. Young children often have small hands compared to adult athletes. And although youth sports may use smaller diameter balls and smaller equipment in general, the size of youth athletic balls and equipment may still be larger than what the young athletes can accommodate with their small hands. If something out of the young athlete's control such as the size of their hands makes a sport difficult to play, young children may become quickly frustrated, and may be discouraged from pursuing the sport altogether.
Athletic gloves with a palm side that is coated with a tacky adhesive substance are known. Such gloves are commonly worn by athletes such as wide receivers in football, for example, to assist those wide receivers in catching passes from the quarterback. However, such gloves are often heavy, and may even include padding that detracts from the sensitivity of the wide receiver's hands that allow the wide receiver to “feel” the ball. Further, the tackiness covering the entirety of the conventional glove's palm side, while advantageous in football (i.e., maximizes the surface area with tack to grip the ball), could prove to be too tacky for gripping and throwing a baseball, thereby causing errant throws.